Most commercial entities receive multiple payments from their customers for goods, services, debts, and the like and issue multiple customer credits within a business day. Detailed management of these financial transactions must be kept by the commercial entity. Such management can be confusing, time-consuming, costly and laden with errors and may result in significant delay of posting a transaction to a customer's account.
Properly managing the financial transactions for a commercial entity is critical to the entity's financial health and economic status, both internally and externally. Accurate accounting of the financial transactions occurring within a financial entity aids the management to make sound financial decisions on daily operations and prepare successful long term strategies. Internal management relies on the status of the business entity's financial health in making strategy decisions. External parties closely scrutinize a commercial entity's financial health when analyzing the value of the commercial entity, evaluating the entity's economic value, determining whether to lend credit to the entity, determining the market value/economic viability of the entity, and the like.
Delaying the posting of a financial transaction to a customer's account prevents the customers from accurately detailing their financial status over the course of a period of time, such as a business day, quarter, and/or fiscal year. In the daily calculation of financial transactions, a short delay may cause inaccurate accounting and cause a commercial entity to delay or refrain from engaging in such activities as investing, paying debts, extending credit, making an initial public offering, selling additional securities, preparing reports for stockholders, preparing tax documents, selling and/or purchasing securities, acquiring another business entity, reporting to government agencies, or otherwise engaging in financial activities.
Oftentimes, business entities implement a system to track financial transactions after the transactions occur to maintain a detailed record of the financial transactions. Many business entities may also perform a periodic accounting of the financial state of their accounts and calculate such things as a total balance of funds in the account, a total amount of sales, a total amount of credits, an itemization of large and/or unique transactions, and the like.
Business entities, especially large commercial entities conducting a high volume of financial transactions within one business day, would significantly benefit from a system that rapidly recognizes a financial transaction to a customer account. Further, a business entity may rely upon a current financial status if each financial transaction was processed and rapidly posted to the customer's account.